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Psychological planned obsolescence is far more interesting than the conspiratorial “planned obsolescence” often attributed to Apple in their development of the iPhone, not least because it’s irrefutably real. Why make a new phone every year? Honestly asking that question inevitably leads one to the conclusion that it is because Apple’s wants more money, and it is only in the customers interest as a result of having been psychologically primed to want the newer, shinier thing.

It started with the manufacture of cars wherein suddenly it was necessary to develop vehicles in new colours and with minor improvements just to keep getting money from the customer, and once these consumables had become more akin to fashion we have never looked back. Progress is obviously a net good, but why is infinite progress good? Why is the current frequency good? Better to ask perhaps if it is even “progress” as much as it is a move towards whatever will next illicit desire.

Progress necessarily means moving forward, and in cases like a faster iPhone this is true, but when we’re talking about a slightly faster iPhone in a new colour it becomes less clear as to why we needed that minor improvement right now rather than in 3 or 4 years when it is no longer slightly faster, but truly a product of half a decade of innovation.

I enjoyed the all too uncommon privilege of having my mind completely changed today by Yaron Brook on The Saad Truth #769. Yaron argued that a state should be entirely ideologically neutral and this immediately set off alarm bells in my brain as to how someone such as Yaron could be falling into the trap of believing that there are no better or worse ideologies. In fact, I knew this to be inconsistent with what this same man had expressed repeatedly in the past, and so I was lost.

Almost as though responding to my confusion Yaron went on to reiterate what he sees as an inability to amongst educators to recognise the western capitalist system as superior to others in implementation and how we are failing to impart this understanding to the young minds in universities whom then go on to function in society .

It all really made sense to me when Yaron pointed out that there are far more ideologically misguided socialists in the UK than Islamists trying to come in, and so if we were to start discriminating based on ideology we would have a seriously difficult time tearing out these deluded students and lecturers from our education system, just as a start.

Unfortunately Yaron went on to talk about his belief in the existence of free will and failed to tackle any of the arguments which show it to be an illusion. For the sake of my sanity I'll leave that topic to the side as just last night I spent about an hour trying to dissuade somebody of the notion of free will and it proved worryingly difficult.